Tasnim Mahdy

is a London-based, Egyptian-Scottish, multidisciplinary, self-taught artist, facilitator, and production designer. Born in Glasgow and raised in Cairo without access to formal arts education, she first honed her craft as a street artist, learning through collective making in public space.Grounded in hydrofeminism, hauntology and emergent strategy, Tasnim’s practice moves fluidly between cyanotype printing, large‑scale murals, drawing and site‑responsive installation.
Across these media she excavates intertwining themes of memory, ecology, mythology and archival erasure – especially as they relate to migration, loss and the politics of place.Cyanotype – with its alchemical interplay of sunlight, salt water and iron – sits at the core of her methodology.
Tasnim employs the process both scientifically and poetically to surface submerged narratives and build living, collaborative archives. In dialogue with researchers such as John Hunnex (curator of the Anna Atkins Collection at the Natural History Museum), she has re‑imagined neglected manuscripts like the Juliana Anicia Codex, exposing plant matter directly onto cloth to propose decolonial systems of knowledge and belonging.
A licensed open‑water diver, Tasnim’s affinity with the blue humanities infuses her palette and politics—underwater currents, coral architectures and shifting seabed light thread through her murals and storyboards.

Collaboration and care structure every project. Working bilingually in English and Arabic, she facilitates trauma‑informed, participatory workshops with refugee and migrant communities, survivors and those excluded from traditional art institutions. These gatherings prioritise embodied storytelling, slow skill‑sharing and mutual aid over product‑focused outcomes.

Recent public works include The Ghost Meridian – a site‑specific installation beneath the hull of the historic Cutty Sark for Royal Museums Greenwich, combining live drawing with a suspended sail inked with a handwritten immigration letter to trace the spectral afterlives of empire. Her murals can be found at Glastonbury Festival, along London’s Stay Strong Route created during the COVID‑19 lockdown, and across community centres and schools through commissions with Artichoke Trust, Amnesty International, Counterpoints Arts and the Southbank Centre.
Whether painting a communal wall, designing a film set or exposing cyanotypes at low tide, Tasnim insists that art is a shared, accessible technology for collective memory and transformation – an invitation to imagine otherwise and to act together.